Dry, Drier, DriEST

 We've been in a real drought, though for some reason I haven't heard the term used much on the news. Perhaps some of that is because precipitation can be very localized, especially with thunderstorms. There is a citizen-science project, cocorahs, that collects local precipitation reports daily from a network of volunteer reporting stations. There is a station just down the street from me, and I'm the backup reporter when the principal is away. So I'm very familiar with the data and invested in it. 

Over the years, I've accessed the data and put it into my own formats for visualizing it. Making data tell a story is one of the things I like to do. So of course I spent a little time during these dreary but not very rainy days taking a look at where we are.

This chart shows the cumulative precipitation by year.
2018 was the wettest year, 2007 the dryest - SO FAR.

 

We are in an historic drought. "Historic" refers to the fact that precipitation so far this year has been consistently among or at the lowest of our records, which date back to 2006. Yikes! I knew it was bad, but not this bad. 

This shows the same data as above, but only through June.
You can see 2023 is right at the bottom.

Sadly, I have not been very good at watering this year. I have containers I water regularly, but I haven't watered plants in the ground very often, not even those I planted this year. Rain or my watering from here on out will be only of marginal help - most plants that needed to grow in the spring cannot adapt to put on a growth spurt in the high summer. The one exception is annuals, which are opportunistic and more likely to be able to grow whenever conditions are favorable. This would include vegetables, and many weeds.

Eggplant Porn; or, I Ate My Babies!

 In early March I planted two varieties of small eggplants in my automated hydroponic unit. I had good germination success, and thinned the unit down to one plant of each variety: Patio Baby and Fairytale. The thinnings went into various containers - two into passive hydroponics, and three into dirt pots. I now have massive plants, medium plants, and small plants (with the Fairytale plants being smaller, but growing conditions also account for differences). All are blooming, and the Patio Baby in the automated hydroponics actually produced a harvest! I ate them last night, a cute tasty side dish to my meal.

My automated unit with two plants today

Blooms! Time to start pollinating!

Pollination works!

This is my passive hydroponic (Kratky) plant.
I picked the large jar from my neighbor's recycling bin.

I moved this plant outdoors because it had aphids.
I washed it, and I'm treating it with neem oil.
I added the trellis - it wasn't used to the wind!
But it has a baby fruit, and many blooms!
More fertilizer needed!

First harvest

Air fried with olive oil. YUM!

Spring is Springing

This is my favorite time of year, before the leaves are fully out. I love the way colors creep out slowly until the whole world turns green and shady. For now, my back yard is still in the sun. Within just a few days, it'll be all shade, and darker than in winter.

Tomatoes

I planted cherry tomatoes in my big new hydroponic Farm on New Years Day. I am now eating them! The plants are compact, less than a foot tall, and laden with fruit. I pollinated them by hand, since there are no bees indoors.

After the flood that is coming, I'm not sure if I'll leave the plants, hoping for a new harvest, or if I'll plant something new.

Salads!

My herbs (some of them)

I am getting a ridiculous amount of pleasure playing with my indoor plants, especially the hydroponic salad garden. I started up in early December, and I've got lettuce enough to keep me in a daily salad. In about a month, I'm going to have a deluge of cherry tomatoes (god willing and the creek don't rise). I don't know that a million cherry tomatoes is ever needed, but I can always cook them down into a quick sauce, since I also am drowning in basil (with sides of oregano, thyme and dill). 

They do require tending, however, it's not just set and forget. The plants in the countertop units need water and liquid nutrients, and the lights on the front of the units helpfully signal when to take care of that. The lights and the water pumps are on automatic timers, and once you've told it when to turn on in the morning (I have them come on at about sunrise) then they are set. But the roots get tangled in the filter and pumps, and regular harvesting is necessary once they get to a certain size.

Seven tomato plants, blooming under my own lights.
That's an old car windshield-screen, reflecting back

The jars need refilling with nutrient-rich mixture, every few days. It's kind of a production, getting my used jugs (picked from the neighbors' recycling boxes) and measuring and mixing the solution, checking each jar, and taking off the lids and topping them off properly. And I had to set the place up, with adjustable shelves to keep the jars the right distance from the lights, and putting my own grow lights on a (simple mechanical) timer.

The big basement unit is smarter than the countertop units and talks to an app on my phone to remind me to top off the water and nutrients. But it also requires maintenance, and I've run into a couple of problems with roots jamming the sensors. 

Blooms and babies!

But spending time tending my salad gardens makes me happy!

Today's lunch
No slugs or bugs!

 

Mostly lettuce in one half of the basement farm
Different colors and shapes and tastes

Mild Winter

 On February 1, these over achieving daffodils are blooming. They were first to bloom last year, some aberration occurring naturally. I will probably pick them and bring them in, because we’ll have a couple of very cold days. 

Also, nearby, the winter jasmine is putting on its annual show in an effort to keep me from rooting out its invasive agressive suckering presence. 

Kratky

Today I moved several cherry tomato plants from The Farm to jars with water under lights. Not a speck of soil to be found! Some of the roots inside the jars are exposed to air in a growing method known as “kratky”, after the guy who promoted it. It’s passive hydroponics, where my plug-in Aerogarden units are active hydroponics, with the water actively spraying from the top over the roots regularly. 

The plants are micro-dwarf varieties. They are expected to not grow more than 24” tall, but produce many clusters of cherry tomatoes as they spread horizontally . They might survive and continue yielding for a year or so, with proper tending. That’s basically to keep water levels right, feed them liquid fertilizer from time to time, inspect the water for slime and algae (the amber jars should prevent that) and make sure they get enough light. 

I left four plants in The Farm, the maximum recommended number. I’m anxious to try dwarf varieties of salad tomatoes, bigger than cherry but smaller than huge slicers. I belong to several Facebook groups where I pick up all this info.

I had cherry tomatoes last year in one of my little active units, lasting about six months. I transplanted some extras last year to dirt pots, but the yield was small. 

The Law of the Farm

Tomatoes on the left, lettuce and herbs on the right
The lights adjust upward as the crops grow up
This is in my basement

Many years ago I read what may have been my very first self-help book ever. It was written by the guy who invented the Franklin Planner, a looseleaf little notebook with pages for calendar and to-do lists, with a system and expensive training classes for how to use it to be more productive, that was all the rage in the 1980s. 

So one of the nuggets of wisdom in the book I read (instead of attending a class) was the Law of the Farm. Basically, the point is, some things have to be done at a certain time (planting, for example) and some things just take time to happen (crops ripening, for example). No matter what you do, you can't break those laws. Therefore, sometimes you have to plan ahead, and if you fail to start at the right time, you will not succeed no matter how hard you try or what you do. This is one of the two nuggets from that book that I remember.

So now, as an indoor farmer myself, I have to respect those laws. 

My kids surprised me at Christmas with a giant indoor hydroponic growing system, called The Farm! It has an electronic control system that turns the lights on and off at the right time, adjusts how often the internal water is circulated depending on whether you are in the germination phase or the growing phase, and an app to alert you about water levels. It came with seeds for cherry tomatoes, lettuce and herbs, which I got started on New Years Day. Soon I'll be moving some of the cherry tomatoes into other containers, and starting some other kinds of larger tomatoes. I'll harvest or move the lettuce and herbs to other containers in a while, and will start (mostly flower) seeds for the outdoor garden in it. Once I transplant the outdoor seedlings, I'll start eggplants and peppers in The Farm. 

Kale, two varieties. I continually snip off the largest leaves
and shred them into my salads.
I also like the extra light at the dark end of my kitchen counter.

I've decided I don't want to try lettuce and greens outside, because I don't like the slugs. I have my four little hydroponic units from last year (same company as The Farm) and I've got lettuce and kale and herbs going there. I'll try to keep an indoor crop going all summer - last year, I planted everything out and didn't start the countertop garden again until Thanksgiving. I've been eating lettuce and kale and dill and thyme (SO MUCH THYME) and basil and thai basil since Christmas. 

The seed catalogues start coming in December now, and according to the Law of the Farm (and limited supply and increasing demand) I have to buy seeds now. So I've got more varieties of lettuce and other greens to grow. Often, my trips to the supermarket are driven by needing salad makings, and much of the lettuce I get seems to slime up quickly. So I much prefer my own, seconds from counter to bowl, but I'm not quite self sufficient yet.